


Cubchoos and Beartics

by cuddlesome



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Pocket Monsters: Sword & Shield | Pokemon Sword & Shield Versions
Genre: Babies, Bipolar Disorder, Character Study, Circus Town | Circhester (Pokemon), Eating Disorders, Gen, Medicinal Drug Use, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood, Past Character Death, Single Parents, Slice of Life, Teen Angst, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:26:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27529945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddlesome/pseuds/cuddlesome
Summary: Maybe some part of her thought her son would stay meek and small forever.
Relationships: Makuwa | Gordie & Melon | Melony
Comments: 28
Kudos: 30





	1. Chapter 1

First babies are supposed to be smaller than the siblings to follow. But no. Eleven pounds and eight ounces of baby has to be pulled out of Melony through a C-section. All of his siblings will be half that, though the triplets required being cut open all over again, so how much does it matter, really?

At the time she doesn’t think about it at all. It’s hard to think about anything but her baby’s chubby little face. 

She wonders what his father would think of him, rubbing her thumb over her ring finger. She’d taken the band off in anticipation of giving birth a few days, wary of the swelling she knew would happen. She'll put it back on as soon as she can.

She second-guesses her choice of name later. He’s too cute for a serious name like Gordon. Calling him a nickname is much more suitable.

Her maternity leave from the gym eventually comes to an end and she’s forced to leave her infant son with a sitter. It breaks her heart every time she has to go and her battling prowess suffers for it.

Once he’s big enough, she requests permission to bring Gordie with her to work.

The audience and sponsors love it. The image of a baby in a papoose sleeping peacefully against his mother’s chest as a lapras gigantimaxes a small distance away is at once comical and charming. He barely makes any sort of fuss as an infant, which is ironic given how much he will as a teen and adult.

Gordie sleeps like a rock through all of the cheering and attacking and Melony’s commands to her pokémon. He only ever cries once when he gets hurt by some burning embers from a fire type attack. Melony gives the challenger a chilling glare. The crowd gets hysterical over it. The challenger is so mortified he doesn’t use that move again for the rest of the battle.

She breastfeeds Gordie and changes his nappy in between matches. The basic staples of raising her son are more challenging than her job in a lot of ways but it’s always rewarding to see him contentedly snuggling up to her once he’s been taken care of.

Becoming known as the "Kangashkan of Circhester" is the logical conclusion to this turn of events.

Once he can reciprocate her love as a small child, Gordie is even more adorable, endlessly affectionate towards her.

Gordie picks up her hairbrush one day and starts trying to work through some of the tangles towards the bottom of her long, thick hair as she reclines on the couch. She glances up from her book as he attempts to tame the worst of the tangles. The effect isn’t much but it’s the thought that counts. 

“Thank you, sugar snow. Do you want a cuddle?” She asks once she judges that he’s torn out enough silvery strands of her hair with the brush.

He climbs onto her lap. Gordie loves being held and having his own hair brushed and listening to her sing. Without fail, he falls asleep in her arms.

He slips on the ice on his way to primary school more than once and comes back home black and blue before she even leaves for work. He has tears and snot running down his face when he hugs her leg, smearing both on her gym uniform. She doesn't mind. It's equal parts gross and cute, like a cubchoo.

She doesn't take into account that a cubchoo will turn into a beartic eventually.

There isn't any one single moment when Gordie pulls away from her. It's a series of instances. One thing's for sure: it's all tied up in him hitting puberty. He's a mild baby, a mild child, a mild preteen. He hasn't said a peep about not going off on his own at ten even when all of his friends left to catch pokémon. He doesn't even seem to have any interest in being a trainer based on how dispassionately he interacts with hers.

Then he hits his teenage years and his body pumps him full of testosterone. Suddenly Gordie is big and loud and has the temperament of an ill-trained frosmoth. He gets in fights at school with no provocation. His marks in every class are terrible. His eyes are still cute, but there's a gelid quality to the blue irises she hadn't seen before.

His voice breaks, then deepens and deepens. That's harmless and to be expected, at least, but it's still strange to hear him sounding so much like his father. 

At this stage he still lets her fuss over his hair and give him big hugs and kisses. He's just shirty about it sometimes, moaning for Mum—not Mummy anymore—to leave him alone. It hurts, but she tries to give him a little more space.

She doesn't need to hug him to notice that he's putting on weight. A lot of weight. Her love of sweets carries over to him. She’s strict about a lot of things, but food isn’t really one of them. Maybe it should be. Gordie eats everything fast and mindlessly until he’s stuffed and then eats some more. He gets taller and bulkier in tandem. She wonders if he gets his predisposition to eat to excess and put on weight from her, too.

With her job, cooking is rarely an option except for breakfast and the occasional tea together. When he cooks for himself, it's always a disaster. They both eat a lot of takeaway.

It only occurs to her later that he’s self-medicating when he gorges himself, trying to bury his teenage upset under food. At the time she doesn't understand what he has to be upset about, only that he is. It chills her to think that if not for her presence he might've turned to drugs. She makes sure to keep her prescriptions hidden just in case.

His other coping mechanism is, bizarrely, gymnastics.

For an already big and still-growing teen, he’s very flexible and acrobatic. She has no idea where he catches the interest for it from. Probably online somewhere. One day he wants to learn how to do a cartwheel and it escalates from there. Doing the splits with no prompting becomes commonplace. He handstands just to prove that he can. Then there’s the back handspring that takes out a chandelier. Anything more complicated than a turn on one foot is banned from the house after that. She's convinced it's dangerous for him and anyone—or thing—around him. Still, it makes him happy when he seems to be happy more and more rarely these days. So, provided it's outside, she's more than willing to spectate when he shows her new tricks.

He works part-time at Bob’s Your Uncle midway through secondary school. The free meals he gets there as an employee—burgers, mostly, that he devours in three bites or less—don’t do his waistline any favors. Melony can hardly criticise when she accepts the free ice cream he brings her.

She keeps insisting that he come work at her gym instead. He keeps coming up with excuses not to. They're all weak. She suspects he's just embarrassed about working for his mother and the inevitable cries of nepotism that will follow. She'll be sure to protect him from that just like she's protected him from everything else.

She's a bit off in her estimation about what's bothering him. More than a little off.

The truth is that Gordie is angry. Angry at expectations and restrictions she hadn't even realised she put on him until it boils over. His skin is icy pale, just like hers, just like all of the fair-skinned Circhester natives, but there’s lava flowing through his veins. A Galarian darmanitan in zen mode, very much in danger of melting himself to nothing.

He's fifteen when he snaps. It's a miracle it didn't happen sooner.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> / trips/  
> / another kind of fluffy kind of angsty melon family fic falls out of my pocket/


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bit of a tone/structure shift here, the first part is almost like a prologue to this one-shotty part. That’s why I broke it into two parts despite having it mostly done when I posted the first part, haha. Glad there was such a warm reception to part one, hope you all like the accidentally-2k-words-longer-than-I-meant-for-it-to-be conclusion.
> 
> Also, stonjourners have a 2% chance of appearing in the grass and I spent two hours finding one so I can only imagine how that would translate to IRL looking for one.

One morning over breakfast she tries once more to suggest that he start training pokémon so he can join her gym. His broad shoulders go rigid and his mouth curls into a sneer. She can't help but be a bit exasperated with him; if he doesn't want to earn money by battling, she has a hard time seeing what career he'll be successful in. Working in fast food forever isn't an option and she knows her son well enough to know he'd go mad in a lab or some secretarial position at a gym. Still, she tries to keep her tone light.

"There are so many adorable pokémon around town for you to catch," she says. "You can get whatever you like. A snom would be easiest, of course, but if you want a challenge then a darumaka would be a good choice."

"What about stonjourners?" Gordie asks, fixated on buttering a slice of toast.

Melony blinks at him. "What about them?"

"I just thought it'd be brill to catch one, that's all." He starts to spread jam on top of the toast, too. "Heard they don't show up very often, but I saw one just the other day."

She tries to let him down gently. "They live in icy areas, Gordie, but they aren't ice types."

"I know," he says, flinty.

"So you wouldn't be able to use one in the gym."

"I know," he repeats, even flintier.

"Why would you—"

"I don't like ice types," he all but shouts.

She recalls a time a stalactite fell down and gashed her arm in the depths of a cave. The cut wasn't deep, but it was long, and it stung. The blood stained her uniform a deep red. It required more stitches than she can remember. Hearing him say he doesn't like her preferred pokémon type hurts about twenty times worse than that incident.

Melony tries to laugh it off. "What are you saying? Of course you like ice types."

Gordie stares down at his plate, butter knife gripped tightly in one hand. "I really don't. I never have. I didn't want to hurt your feelings, but I can't take it anymore. The thought of building a team with them is... nightmarish."

"Don't be so dramatic," she chastises, but that's very much like telling a Mr. Rime not to dance.

"Ice types are freaky, Mum. They'd just as soon give you frostbite as look at you."

It's hard not to take it personally. None of her sweet pokémon would dream of doing such a thing outside of the constraints of a battle.

"You act like they're the only pokémon that are dangerous," she says levelly, "when there are pokémon that can burn your flesh down to the bone."

Gordie only scoffs and drops his knife to his plate with a clang. "Well, it's not like fire types are my favorite."

"Then what do you prefer, Gordie?"

So quiet she almost can't hear him, he says, "Rock types."

Melony folds her arms. "...rock types."

Should've figured from the way he talked about that stonjourner. It's better than fire types, but not by much.

Neither she nor Gordie can predict that what would come to be his signature pokémon would be a dual rock and fire type. One that regularly incinerated people that disrespected mines.

"Why?" She asks.

He pushes his hair out of his face and looks away. "I like them because... they're solid. They don't melt except for in extreme heat. People see them as clumsy oafs, but I think they can be graceful in their own way. And I could prove it."

His cute eyes light up like they never had when he spoke about training pokémon in the past. They dim when he looks back at her.

"If you want to catch rock type pokémon," Melony says, soft as can be, "I can't stop you."

"Maybe not, but you can strongly discourage me with the look of shame."

"The look of shame?"

He points at her. "That face. The face you're making right now. You don't want to let me be my own person. You just want me to be a little you and you'll make me feel like a slimy twat if I'm not."

She inhales. He's never spoken to her like that. Where is all of this coming from?

"Don't talk that way," she says, frigid.

He barks a low laugh.

"You're not even trying to deny it." He covers his face with his hands. "Why did I think you would understand?"

"Gordie—" She half-stands and reaches across the table to press her hand to his forearm.

No sooner does she graze him than he jerks away. "Don't touch me."

Melony freezes. He'd rejected physical affection before, but never like that. Never so angrily.

Gordie stuffs his entire piece of toast in his mouth. Then he stands and rushes away.

Melony snaps out of her daze long enough to call after him in a stern voice, "Gordon, don't you dare try to swallow that all at once, you'll choke."

"Dun tell me whuh to do!" Moments later she hears the telltale sound of him choking and consequently pounding on his chest before he makes it to the door.

"If you're going out, don't forget your jacket!"

"Mum!" He yells indignantly, but she hears the telltale rustle of cloth as he takes it off of its hook.

The door opens, then slams shut. Melony sinks back down in her chair. She sits in silence at the table. She considers pouring some rum into her tea, but stops herself, knowing it will mix badly with her medication.

She looks down at her manicured hand in dismay. What did her baby suddenly find so offensive about her touch?

She doesn't realise that morning that when Gordie walks out he isn't planning on coming back for a while. 

He's gone for three days. No one in town has seen him, not the corviknight cabbies, not Circhester residents, not visitors coming up from the routes. Fresh snow cleared the trails of any prints to follow. He's in real danger of getting fired and his schoolwork piles up, but that's nothing compared to the very real possibility that he's lost or worse. 

She closes the gym and looks for him with her trainers. She barely sleeps or bathes and forgets to eat. The last day she forgets to take at least two doses of lithium, too wrapped up in searching. The withdrawal is immediate and intense; headaches, mood swings, the works. She's so tired she can't tell if she's having a depressive episode or a manic one. She snaps at Liana enough times to make her cry, which in turn makes Melony cry.

The fourth night, Melony walks back home soaked to the bone thanks to slipping and falling into a snow drift. She needed the help of one of her trainer's beartics to get out. She'd been pushing it to the back of her mind, but the fears that have been haunting her all this time surface in light of the incident—maybe that's what had happened to him.

This time sixteen years ago, the mountain swallowed Gordie's father up. One night he just didn't come home. Melony searched tirelessly then, as she did now, but after a couple of weeks she had to give up for fear of hurting their unborn child by pushing herself so hard.

They didn't find his body, preserved in snow and ice, until spring. Was it pokémon that killed her husband or was it just the elements? There's no real way to know. He could have done something as simple as fall into deep snow like she did.

He had pokémon and even they hadn't been able to save him. The pokéballs were frozen shut when they first found them. Once they unfroze, Melony released them back into the wild, unable to bear the reminders of him. But there was another reminder growing inside of her.

The thought of the same fate befalling their son makes Melony sick to her stomach.

And so, with all of that grief and panic brought to the forefront, she almost doesn't believe her eyes when she finds Gordie right outside the front door. He's even paler than usual, sick-looking, and he smells like the woods and sweat, but he's very much alive.

"Gordie?"

"Hey, Mum. Forgot my keys." His tone is casual, as if nothing had happened.

Melony grabs him and kisses every inch of his face, feeling tears rise in her eyes despite crying herself out earlier.

"Ugh, Mum—" He doesn't try to struggle away, but a light squeeze is all the reciprocity the gesture gets. "You're all wet."

"I fell into a snow drift trying to find you." A note of anger enters her voice. "I've been looking everywhere."

He winces. "I know."

"You what?" 

He knew? Had she and her trainers been right on top of him all along and just not seen him because he hid from them? 

"Where were you all this time?" Melony asks.

"Can we get inside? It's freezing. More than usual."

Reluctantly, she unlocks the door and lets them both in, but she's determined to block the way to getting any further in the house.

"Where were you?" She repeats.

"Does it matter? I'm back now." He stomps the snow off of his shoes.

He takes off his jacket and an ultra ball falls out of the pocket. It hits the ground with its signature _bwomp._

"Shite," Gordie snatches the ultra ball up.

She can't even get on him about his language, she's too angry about everything else. "You went to go catch a pokémon, alone, without telling anyone?"

"What, this? This is empty." 

He looks away, the tell that he's been lying since he was little. When he was a child he lied over silly things, little things, like who had decorated her pokéballs with stickers. Not about things like this.

"Oh, really?" She reaches out. "Then if I were to take it and toss it in the air it wouldn't—"

"No!" His head snaps back forward and he holds the ball protectively to his chest.

She lets her hand drop to her side in a fist. "It's that stonjourner, isn't it?"

"...no." He looks away again.

"What were you thinking? If you were so determined to get it, you should've at least borrowed Holiday."

Her lapras probably would've knocked a stonjourner out in one go, but all the better. It could've killed him. It could've kicked his guts in and her only son would be dead.

He pockets the ultra ball. "I'm getting dinner. I'm hungry."

She shouldn't begrudge him that, he probably hasn't eaten since that piece of toast, but the avoidance makes her even more upset. As he brushes past her, impossible not to do in the narrow hall, she speaks again.

"You're hungry? What a big change from usual." It's a low blow, but she wants to hurt him even a fraction of the amount he'd hurt her with his stunt.

He stops and looks at her over his shoulder. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you're always stuffing your face, you—you overgrown greedent." It's petty and mean and she wishes she could take it back the second she says it.

Gordie colors but says nothing.

"But you had to make yourself hungrier. Did starving in the wilderness because of your own grumpigheadedness not feel good?" She doesn't realise that she's crying until the tears drip off of her chin. "Did you eat or sleep even a little out there? Why would you do something so stupid, Gordon? I was so sure we would find you dead somewhere, or not find you at all—"

All of the anger in his face drains away, as if it's just now dawning on him how worried she'd been, as if he's really that thick. "I'm sorry, Mum, I didn't realise—I shouldn't've—"

He turns back and tries to hug her. She pushes him away. He blinks down at her; this is the exact opposite of what usually happens.

"You don't get to do that now, not after what you put me through, you selfish child." She hugs herself, sobbing.

"Mum. Are you off your meds?" 

She startles and gapes at him.

He gives her an unreadable look. "Did you think I didn't know?"

He guides her to the living room, settles her down on the couch, and lights a fire in the fireplace. She lets him, rubbing her temple as she sits down.

"Where've you got it?" Gordie asks as he places a change of clothes, her lapras-print pajamas, beside her.

"Bottom drawer in the bathroom. Under the sanitary pads." A place he probably wouldn't look, though she's shuffled the hiding place around a few times over the years.

Gordie grunts and leaves. She changes out of her wet clothes and into the pajamas while he's gone, then dries her tears best she can.

She told herself she hid the lithium so he wouldn't take it, but deep down she knows there's no chance he could would use it. She'd just been embarrassed. She didn't want her little cubchoo to know. How was she supposed to bring it up to a child, anyway? _"Have a good day at school, snow cone, Mummy's going to make sure to manage her bipolar disorder so she doesn't lose it at the gym. What's that? Well—"_ She didn't take it at all when she was pregnant and breastfeeding him and almost felt guilty when her milk dried up and she went back to refilling her prescription. But over the course of his life he had to have seen her taking her medicine with meals. He's old enough to understand now.

He reheats some miltank and marmite stew that one of Melony's trainers brought her the other day that she'd promptly stuck in the fridge and forgotten about. Gordie hands her a bowl, a glass of water, and her pill bottle, then sits down beside her with his own bowl. She tries to shove down years of embarrassment as she takes her late dosage and to her surprise it isn't as hard as she thought it would be. It helps that Gordie doesn't stare at her, instead looking at the fire.

He clearly forces himself to eat a bit more slowly than usual and sets aside some leftovers. She worries that she'd made him self-conscious with her earlier comments, but he brushes off her apology.

"It's fine. It's a bad habit to lycanroc it all down. Before you ask, I did eat while I was out there. Bought a bunch of food off of a person camping on route 8." He sits back and sighs. "Besides, I'm not solving anything by stretching my stomach out and getting fatter."

Melony gasps, scandalised. She'd been aware of it for years, of course, but hearing him actually voice it aloud is another thing entirely.

"Who told you that? You're just big-boned."

"Mum. Be real."

"You're curvy, just like your mother."

He rolls his eyes.

After dinner he brushes her hair, working out all of the tangles and pushing it to a light sheen. He's much better at it now that he's grown up some.

Melony can feel herself dozing off thanks to pure exhaustion, but she fights sleep to turn around and give him another hug. He actually hugs her back for once and tears prickle at her eyes for what feel like the dozenth time tonight.

She rubs his back. "I was so scared, Gordie. I'm so glad you're okay."

"I'm sorry. I won't do it again. I promise. I love you, Mummy."

He might not run off, but they will fight again. So many times. She meets her second husband and Gordie decides he doesn't like him, so they fight about that. It becomes clear that, yes, he's determined to train rock types and only rock types; the stonjourner wasn't an isolated incident. Fight. Then there's the very public fight that they have once he's older after which it seems to everyone they don't speak for months. In fact he still periodically sneaks home to have tea with her because he's a mummy's boy at heart despite all his posturing.

Worst of all is when he ruins his beautiful hair with dye and copious amounts of gel! Their tempers clash particularly badly then.

But none of that stops her from founding his fan club or Gordie from holding his half-sister and half-brothers in his arms with endless affection. He back flips off of the roof of the gym more than once to surprise—his words, not hers, she would describe it as more of an ambush—her on the way out on birthdays and holidays. 

Melony makes curry especially for his team of pokémon, even if his stonjourner eyes her warily and his binacle and shuckle are both a bit sassy. The carkoal is a menace all on his own, playfully sending embers at her pokémon whenever he encounters them. They each warm up to her with time and might even love her, though it's in the same grumpy, fiercely independent way that their trainer does.

Gordie still groans and makes a scene when she hugs him, but the hugs are always returned. No matter how many times he does it, she's startled to discover just how big and strong he's gotten. It's a beartic hug, all right.


End file.
